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5/27/10

Let's Be Done With This One. Next!

What Rand Paul said in full context...

One thing is clear, Rand Paul is able to stir up lively debate on topics that have been "off-limits" in public forums for years. Up next...his views on abortion which differ from his father regarding government intervention of the medical procedure. He is astute enough to know that he is in Kentucky, he has to build his own reputation and distinguish himself as his own person.

Yesterday he did shake-up his campaign and maybe not exactly the way the nervous Corporate Republicans would have him. He moved his campaign manager up to campaign chairman and replaced him with Jesse Benton, a campaign aid to his father known for his courteous and mannerly demeanor. It's a good move. He does need the experience from his father's staff, to avoid the fracas caused when he walked into the gotcha journalism of MSNBC and celebrity TV hostess Rachel Maddow.

Rand Paul and other candidates shaking up the Republican establishment should reopen these debates and speak their mind but they must also be mindful of the media sharks whose real goal is ratings. The only people who are really freaked out over his ideas are liberals. Moderates are wishy-washy and don't have a stand and until they do take a position, they're irrelevant. Republicans, if not openly, are secretly pleased that these folks are bringing new life and a revival to what had become a tired old agenda.

Naked open truth and realness are what is needed in political campaigns now and Rand Paul, among others, should continue to do that but without giving seminars on their views but rather honest summaries.

What happened with Maddow was an ambush in the phony way liberals feign to be fair and unbiased.

These two videos are the full context of what Rand Paul said on the Rachel Maddow show about his views on civil rights, the 1964 Civil Rights act and private business. His only error was to fully discuss a philosophy with a celebrity tv show host who only deals in snippets. My suggestion to Rand Paul is to avoid all liberal mainstream media because their goal is to discredit him, no matter how graciously they gratuitously act towards him.








4 comments:

  1. I don't know much about Rand Paul, but from what I do know I want to like him. After watching these videos, he is making it difficult.

    I should probably say that I am a libertarian at heart, and that what Mr. Paul said seems reasonable to me. I might have it wrong, but his whole gist seemed to against government intrusion into private enterprise. I am on board with that, for sure.

    Then there's Rachel Maddow. I am not now a fan of hers, and I don't expect to ever become a big fan in the future.

    But-and I hate to give her credit for this-she asked Rand Paul several times, in several ways, if he would've voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    That's answerable one of two ways: yes or no.

    Paul did all he could to not say yes or no. That puts him right in there with every politician I don't like.

    He stated at one point that he hated racism of any kind, then made an allusion to the idea that public opinion would toss the racist businesses aside and support the non-racist ones. That seems like a reasonable assumption in a capitalist country; if I were Paul and believed that I think I'd have said "no" to Maddow, and explained why I thought the Act didn't need to cover private enterprise. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider private enterprise to be outside of the federal government's jurisdiction.

    I come at this 46 years too late to really KNOW the context (and honestly, if Paul or Maddow think they have a clue about 1964 I have a feeling they are wrong). I do know that Paul did everything he could not to give a clear answer, and I can't fault Maddow for trying to get one.

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  2. She may have asked him but she was trying to pin a butterfly and that was just wrong. What bothers a lot of us that are 10-15 years older than him, Maddow or you is that we lived through this stuff and to hear it hashed out in an abstract way, out of context of the times it occurred, just doesn't seem right.

    To this day I rarely talk about going to a segregated high school in the deep south and living through real life desegregation, the inhumanity and violence of it all. It needed to be done, it was painful and it was done. We need to move on if we are ever to get past and beyond it. That doesn't mean we forget it, we grow and get better because of the past but we don't hang onto old talking points.

    Yes, he could have done a better job of responding. She shouldn't have ever asked.

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  3. I went to the woods and just got back, and in the meantime the only thing I thought about besides the woods and the creatures in it was your blog and my comment regarding it. Granted I didn't spend too much time thinking about it, but that I thought of it at all up there is a very cool thing.

    I still don't like politicians who won't answer a yes or no question, but I dislike even more people like Maddow who try to get all Woodward-and-Bernstein about something they know nothing about.

    I'm trying to think of the right words to describe her actions and I'm going with yours: abstract hashing. That sums it up perfectly. Her efforts, whatever the result, would in the big picture add up to nothing but-as you said-pinning a butterfly...which image actually crossed my mind earlier today as I sat watching a tiger swallowtail moth cruising through the boggy area up north. Interesting.

    And no, I don't believe in pinning butterflies, either.

    Thank you for making me think about this stuff, JR.

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  4. Thanks for making me think by your responses because I have been thinking about the "yes" or "no" part also. I really don't like anyone not answering with a simple "yes" or "no" but I also know that as an instructor for a large corporation for a long time, I often found myself "skirting" an answer because I had answered similar questions directly in the past and immediately got pinned to the wall. It seems to me that some questions can't be answered "yes" or "no' because the answer is more nuanced than that. To answer simply one way or the other to a complex subject, invites the questioner to interpret the answer in any way they want, which could be out of context and in their terms. I hope that made sense.

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